Imagine
the essay as an artifact of the topography of a landscape. Wander
through and discover it, a found object, like a stone or a pine
cone or an antler. The words might look like markings on a beech
tree. Read it and find your way to the place or the thing it
describes. Hold it like a map and trace the texture underfoot. It
has perspective and color unique to the writer. If the essay is
beautifully formed it will take you in and out of yourself like a
sailboat tacking up wind or a switchbacking trail or a meandering
river. The essay eases you through the terrain. There are ascents
and descents, trials that will test your imagination.

Artifact

Composing
is a procedure, an examination of traits of facts of this or
that—a mountain ridge, a pool of water, a stick—and
the unique thoughts that encase them in a bundle. The essay is
produced like larvae or a pearl. Facts become artifacts when they
are artfully restructured in a unique product: the essay. The
essay is a literary distortion, a byproduct of reassembly,
changed by observation and trickled through thought like
deposition. The reader recovers the essay as artifact and
imagines, experiences the fact. The cut
sunflower opens like a hand above the lip red petals of a rose;
green stems extend in prisms of a clear glass vase. Can you see
it? Here, an assemblage of facts produces an artifact fragment.

Topography

In
the yard by the lake, a crow flies off with the crumb of a peanut
butter cookie. A hummingbird shivers into the pistil of a
dangling drooped geranium. White cap chop appears on the lake,
chimes ring on the porch, and the gray cat stretches one leg
above the glass table. Will it rain again? The crisp green leaves
rustle their mint undersides. Somewhere cows group together in a
field. A yellow finch sings in the staked pear tree amidst the
mottled saffron leaves. A female mallard leads her teal-headed
mate to the high green squirrel-baffled birdfeeder. She scoops up
sunflower seeds in a hurry; the male scans the territory.
Earlier, the bull thistle plant keeled over; sopped roots ooze
and seed fluff floats like a tiny flock of white birds. Abruptly,
on a swoop of air, a murderous shriek. That woman, the one with
the barking beagle, runs out of the house by the lake, her hands
cover her face. The ducks look up. She cries from some broken
place inside herself. Inside the house, the neighbor dangles dead
on a rope he has hung in the basement stairwell. When the rain
comes the cat sits silent on the front porch. The birds she
chases wait under the green sides of leaves in the oak trees.

The
structure of the artifact is the structure of the essay is the
structure of the fact—when assembled, they are identical.
The literary structure of this formula may be called plot. A plot
cannot be imposed upon a collection of facts; in an essay as
artifact of reassembled facts through action, observation, and
thought, the plot is “discerned” or “released”
in the new sense of the human construction.

ARTIFACT
(ESSAY) + FACT

FACT
+ ESSAY (ARTIFACT) = PLOT

Michel
de Montaigne, who is credited with inventing the essay, says that
images of facts, especially when vivified, are inseparable from
thought. How could it be otherwise? It was this particular
thought in this moment, and no other in the universe, that
recreated the image. The structure of thought is the structure of
the essay.

Essayist
As Hero

My
neighbor, Arnold, whose family was from Tennessee, mowed the lawn
on the Friday afternoons of my girlhood. I kept Dutch Blue
rabbits in a cage on a shady edge of my driveway that faced
Arnold’s lawn. I liked to watch him mow so I brought the
rabbits grain at noon that day when I heard the mower start, the
day of the accident. I ducked behind the cage and watched him
through the wire mesh while the rabbits sniffed my lips. Arnold
was an athlete, a track star. His mother told me he ran six
minute miles consistently. She looked like Mrs. Cleaver on “Leave
It To Beaver.” Arnold wore a pair of black Converse high
top sneakers, cut off shorts, and a green Tee shirt. Brown bangs
obscured his pimply forehead. He had a big nose; I don’t
know why I found him so attractive. Maybe it was his thinness,
his accent, his silence; he rarely spoke directly to me. A hill
behind his house leveled into a soggy valley between our yards.
He was mowing in the valley when I saw him jump and point to his
foot. I stood up. The rabbits froze. Arnold made a sound like my
rabbits, who screamed when they were scared, but Arnold didn’t
run, he just pointed to his foot. He looked directly at me, there
was no one else. I knew what was wrong, but I couldn’t
move. I hated myself in that moment; I have always hated that
moment. He seemed to lose power and dragged himself up the hill,
into his garage. An ambulance arrived and I waited for the
stretcher. He was covered in white. Should I shout to him,
“Arnold, I’m sorry?” I could not move. His
mother ran into our little valley and said, to me, “Will
you help me look for his foot?” She held up the toe of his
sneaker against her white apron and said, “It’s not
in here. We have to find it—he’s an athlete.” I
obeyed. Together we ran our fingers through the grass, some of it
cut, some of it shaggy. I hoped I would be the one to glide my
hand across his toes.

The
composer is the hero of the personal essay and thus, by proxy, of
the event. The essayist begins a journey, physical or mental, and
makes attempts, faces trials, finds protectors along the way, and
may become a protector to some one or some thing. The hero, often
one with a flaw, is usually changed by experiences in the
topography and brings something back to the departure point that
makes the essayist, at least, a hero to the reader. Field data is
collected or remembered and reconstructed as an essay artifact.
The prose scene above is a collection of facts, the structure of
which corresponds to the thoughts, the actions, and the event.
This forms the plot and it was and is accessed, in part, through
emotions leading to and through the topography of that yard.

Composing
is what Aristotle calls an act of “imitation.” The
essayist as imitator represents actions of self, actions of
others, and objects or places in the topography. The
essay is a kind of improvisation of events. The reader, of
course, will recognize the structure of reality in
finely-improved imitations.

The
hero experiences objective reality with a unique thought
structure, a process that Montaigne calls a “pattern.”
This pattern corresponds to the structure of action, emotions,
topography, plot, and artifact in a simple formula.

HERO
> TOPOGRAPHY = PLOT + ARTIFACT

The
hero who sets out to explore a topography reacts with emotion,
sometimes painful, to encountered “textures.”
Rational analysis appropriately assembles the topographical
textures into the essay artifact in a process of mental and
physical, inner and outer, exchange. Montaigne says that “We
must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed,
like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of
different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud.
If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He
must know how to use them together and blend them. Our existence
is impossible without this mixture.” Habits of thought
create identifiable patterns not only in the essay but also in
nature.

Topo
Map

Shirley
Jackson wrote her autobiography about raising children in
Bennington Vermont. Her husband was a Bennington College
professor. Jackson wheeled her team of toddlers around in
multiple strollers on the town’s main street. She attended
hot-headed parties at the college with her husband. The curvy
roads leading in and out were hard to navigate when they were
drunk. But the reader can navigate them easily by following
Jackson’s essays in two accurate dimensions, the pattern of
her thoughts that template the patterns of topography around
Bennington.

The
gazebo where Captain Von Trapp proposed to Maria exists in a
sunny field in Vienna Austria. He probably didn’t sing
“Here I am standing there loving you / so somewhere in my
life I must have done something right,” but according to
the autobiography, he did meet her there after ending his
engagement to the Countess. It is easy to spot the round white
roof of the gazebo in the glade, slide your hands along the rails
where they sat, and look out the windows toward the Alps. The
topography is perfectly mapped; place and the action of betrothal
are the same form intertwined by the action of her thought.

Does
the prose segment above follow this linear construction? Thought
that reflects such style in the composing strata of the essay,
thought based upon scrupulous field data and accurate assemblage,
will produce an artifact that is reproducible in the field in
reverse formula. Such style is texture on the essay map that
corresponds to texture in the landscape. The reader can
follow the essay topo map back to the thing described if it
incorporates the rhetorical and poetic styles of expression used
to create the imitation.

The
essayist is a navigator, an explorer, a mountaineer, a meanderer
in the terrain. The essayist maps the topography by following the
discoveries of thought in a formula that looks remarkably like
its antecedent.

Thought
(Action + Emotion) + Topography > Plot = MAP + Artifact

Sailboat
Tacking

The
Captain with the map, bits of maps of islands scribbled on a
napkin, was ready to navigate the Central America sea topography.
He read the wind on the back of his hand; his skin was like
tumbled glass. “Just look at the ripples,” he said,
that trilled the water like piccolo notes. Topography is shaped
by wind, waves and lake chop, mountains and deltas. This was a
vast shallow sea inside a barrier reef that levied the Atlantic
Ocean. The live reef creature wall snaked the coast like the edge
of a tub. Inside ships could sail a deep channel, maybe ninety
feet, surrounded by the neck deep lime green water of exposed
reefs. Homeward, he sailed northwest into the wind, tacking all
the way, nine knots, snagging the wind on a geometric two
dimensional plane.

The
essay tacks between the interior life of the mind and the
exterior terrain, capturing both in a self-conscious analysis
that will eventually become the artifact. The most interesting
part of the composing is the processing of external traits of
facts through the individual mind, through facets never seen
before. Each unique assemblage adds to the knowledge of
particular things, of things arranged in structures. How many
people know that this Captain’s skin has texture structured
by tropical winds? Or that a sailboat, like an essayist, can take
a headlong challenge by using the power that creates the
obstacle? For the essayist, the obstacle is often this tendency
to “stray” in thinking—hence the reputation of
the essay as so many endless channels. Yet this very effect of
buffeted thought is the action in reaction to topography that
powers the plot. The effect of thinking about a fact is like
observing a quark: examination always changes it.

Switchbacking
Trail

Double
blazes on mountain trails always indicate a switch, and how apt
that it should be this doubling that alerts the hiker who must
move horizontally across a vertical plane in order to ascend.
Sometimes the backcountry hiker continues past the blazes into
the woods and loses the way. Sometimes the hiker is not looking
up. Hard worn paths that stray beyond the blazes lure many hikers
past the mark. Confounded, exhausted, the hiker returns to the
double blazes and marks the switch. It is necessary for efficient
ascension.

Some
essays stray too far along with their essayists. In this case an
artifact is produced that misleads to the point of irritation,
what Aristotle calls “bad taste in language.” These
forms might correspond to the hiker on a lark, the sailboat on a
slide, when in fact, the switch between the examining mind and
the encountered facts must effectively drive the reader toward
assimilation of what Aristotle said was the “arrangement of
parts.” In this case the arrangement is assisted by the
efficient use of power in reaching the goal, or the point of the
essay, in manageable, edited style.

Meandering
River

The
Catskill Mountains in New York State were formed from rubble
descending the slopes of the Allegheny plateau. Melt water poured
into the alluvium, meandered to the delta, and finally sorted the
deposition of wavy sands into the sea. The geometry of the
meandering river displays balance on the inside and outside bends
of channel velocity. The river eased through the valley from side
to side and carried rocks from the mountains in the fast deep
center. This meandering river structure, seemingly aimless, is
the one course of efficient flow. Today the story of the eroded
plateau is in the topography.

If
the essay meanders as its reputation seems to imply, how is it
that the thought and the experience of the composer that leads to
action, can be called a plot? The essay very definitely assigns a
different meaning to the term plot than is typical of the
horizontal plot. Even Aristotle said that action was the
structure of the plot. The essayist in action is either in the
field or at the keyboard, in either case composing the artifact
by assembling the facts of memory. It is the reader who reenacts
the plot by an act of thinking.

What
is the most efficient route to the point of an essay when the
essayist is meandering? On the one hand, the mind slams into its
subject in the field—the inner depositional bend in a
river—then veers back into processing—the outer
erosive bend in a river. The deep center of the river carries the
flooded topography of mountain slopes to the sea, as the essayist
drives home the point of personal action to the universal case.
The reader finds the artifact and feels the spark of knowledge in
the act of reconstruction.

We
wander the most efficient course through topo textures; this is
attained by adaptation of the mind to the terrain through action
and experience and back again to form the artifact.

Kathryn
Kurtz lives on the banks of the Hudson River in Nyack with
her NYC firefighter husband. He has four girls and she has three
boys. Kathryn is Adjunct Professor of English and Journalism at
Ramapo College of New Jersey. She has a doctorate in Creative
Writing: Nonfiction from Union University, an M.F.A. in
Nonfiction from Goucher College, and a B.S. in Analytic
Philosophy from the State University of New York. Her book
Swichbacks: Ascending the Catskill Mountain High Peaks is
currently under review. Her poems have appeared in collections:
Kiss me Goodnight, the Hudson Valley Review, and
the Catskill Canister. She was a monthly commentator for
NPR's "Marketplace" and she founded the international
newsletter Marketing to Women. Kurtz has two new books in
the oven; one is about suicides who jump and the other is about
the Susquehanna River.